A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.
Well-wrought touches of the fantastic enhance this tale of a girl growing up in a Canadian logging camp a century ago.
About the time that Pearly Everlasting Hazen—named for a wildflower—is born in a remote logging camp in New Brunswick in 1920, her father, the camp cook, finds a tiny, orphaned bear cub in an ice-rimmed burrow. He brings the creature home, and his wife nurses her infant daughter and the cub together. As far as Pearly Everlasting and her family are concerned, Bruno is her brother, even as he grows big enough to unsettle strangers. The logging camps where the Hazens live are harsh places; if the work doesn’t kill someone, the weather might. Pearly Everlasting’s mother, Eula, is a healer who tends workers’ broken bones and other wounds, while her husband, Edon, keeps everyone fed. Pearly Everlasting and Bruno—and human older sister Ivy—grow up in this nurturing nest, attuned to the natural world and pretty much blissfully unaware of what’s beyond. Their only outside contact is a woman they call Song-catcher, an ethnologist who, with her companion, Ebony, travels around with cumbersome recording equipment to document folk music and tales by people like Eula. The eventual snake in this childhood paradise is a new camp boss, a bully named Swicker, who arrives with a couple of minions and soon has Bruno in his sights. An attempt to bear-nap Bruno and sell him to an animal trader is foiled with the help of Song-catcher and Ebony, but later girl and bear, teenagers by now, stumble upon a murdered body, and Bruno is blamed and confiscated. Pearly Everlasting’s harrowing quest to get him back, on foot through the winter woods and then in a town that’s a complete mystery to her, is paralleled by the search for the pair by a young man named Ansell, a worker at the camp whose face is strangely webbed with silver scars, the result of a lightning strike. Armstrong, who has published five books of poetry and two previous novels, tells their tale in lyrically striking prose and makes its fairy tale elements work by grounding them in the grim realities and stunning beauties of life in a Depression-era logging camp.
A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396142
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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